Emotional Connection

While I've been very proud of my work thus far, there are some key areas I feel I've been missing out on. After meeting with the department head at my school he very quickly discovered what that was: My work thus far doesn't have real emotional pull to create action which is a vital, and necessary skill for a designer. To really manipulate an audience into caring or buying something that they feel they now need or want.

So now I need to brainstorm some problems people have so I can create work that identifies their problem, relates to it, and then offers a solution for it. The form is of my choosing which could be another django app, a jquery/HTML5 website, a node.js web application or even an iOS application.

I don't really know off the top of my head what other people are needing help with something I can offer on the web. I do know though how I feel about some happenings I would like to know more about but don't know where to start.

Nutrition

I don't know much about nutrition but I do know my current health habits are atrocious. So maybe something that plays into the fear of the side effects of an unhealthy life style and some factual information about what the average human body needs to stay healthy. For example the average amount of calories one should intake in a day. Of course that's been done before...

Drawing

Drawing is something I'm finding I need more and more and it's something I just haven't enjoyed. So a project that tries to connect the frustration of learning to draw and breaks it down into something actionable that makes it enjoyable would be a good app to make. There's a few different directions it could take. Like smaller assignments that just involve drawing with a timer just to get people comfortable with just going at it and not worrying about how perfect it is but capturing the 3D object into 2D space and if you don't use it at least once a week it sends you an email every couple of days to say you should.

Art

I've met a lot of people out there that just don't get the idea of "art" in general. They don't understand how to look at it, how to think of it, and they see it as something that's not important or useful. So maybe some basic art education app/site for people that don't otherwise give a shit?

Web Design & Development

This one would require the least amount of research for me which would mean I can put more time into creating that emotional impact with it. I've talked to a lot of students at my school who are trying to get into interactive design but struggling with the coding elements. Even the classes we offer either deter a lot of people or they feel kind of frustrated & overwhelmed by it. So maybe something that explains the context of coding and offers more insight of what a programmer does to try and build logic skills to solve problems while focusing on breaking that information into something more fun and something that helps students not feel so overwhelmed. But granted there's a lot of competition in this, and this definitely wouldn't be new to attempt something like that.

Hm.. well that's all I got for now. I'm going to keep mulling it over and see what I can come up with.